UPDATE: The winner of the giveaway for the book Trinkets by Kirsten Smith is Liz! And her long Ira Glass quote! Congratulations, Liz, you'll be getting an e-mail from me. I will start drawing the quote I chose for the second giveaway ASAP and will post it next week, there's been some other stuff going on here which I will tell you about as soon as shit settles down. Thanks, as always, for your patience and continued interest in fussy.org. PART 1

It turns out that when I try to rush through my drawings, they suck. I end up throwing out more paper and wasting more time -- but when I sit back, take an hour, and really think about what wants to happen on the little 5 x 7 card on my lap, I have more of a chance to draw something that makes me really happy. "It does not matter how slow you go, as long as you do not stop," Confucius purportedly said.

Or, in the words of someone who's still alive:

This is what I mean by taking the time to work out something that makes me really happy. I ended up being so happy with this one that I decided to add a little color:

Then I wondered whether an "amazing" mouse would still be brown? I don't want to overthink it, my until-now unexamined prejudice that normal, brown mice cannot be amazing. I ran the idea past Jackson and he told me to make the mouse pink, duh. Oh my God, is that racist?

It would be TOTALLY racist except that now that the mouse is pink it looks like a mole, or a fetal . . . something.

The next drawing request was for "a hippo sitting in a pool of water, holding an umbrella." I could not for the life of me draw a hippo holding anything -- have you seen a hippo's hands? I couldn't even fake it in a way that made sense, so I came up with this:

I like this because it's what Peewee does when we're eating dinner in front of the television, he puts his chin on the table so that we won't forget to set a place for him. Why do we keep forgetting to do that?

But if a hippo put his chin on the edge of a backyard pool, you would soon have a hippo in an empty pool and a lawn saturated with hippo effluvia.

Which is gross.

PART 2: I HAVE ANOTHER BOOK TO GIVE AWAY, PEOPLE. It's a YA novel called Trinkets by Kirsten Smith. It's about three high school-age girls who meet in Shoplifters Anonymous. Three souls united by a need to take what isn't theirs! Sadly, I can relate, as there were a few years in there when . . . yeah.

I think my total take was a pair of cheap sunglasses and a couple of records that I could have afforded. I was just being an asshole who wanted to have her cake (pocket money) and eat it too (not spend it, but still get stuff). You know how I got away with it? I looked like I could afford it. Pure white middle-class privilege.

I grew a moral backbone eventually, but what's interesting for me about Trinkets is that the kids in the book talk about their actions and think about them far more deeply than I ever did, thus helping them to grow the hell up and get through their problems in a way that was not open for me at that age. A friend of mine is writing a term paper on how tween and YA literature can be useful in helping kids to process and grow through their own questions and problems, but at that age I was coming out of my King Arthur phase and just about to begin my descent into the Great American Alcoholic Canon (Berryman, Bukowski, et al) so I don't know if re-reading The Cat Ate My Gymsuit would have helped.

Oh boy. In order to keep myself from falling into a shame spiral over the lost years of my rudderless adolescence, I'm going to tie this all together and ask you to leave a comment if you'd like a chance to randomly win a copy of Trinkets, and in that comment I'd like you to give me a quote that inspires you to be your better self. I am always on the lookout for wisdom, and as a bonus giveaway I'll also choose a random comment-quote to illustrate for the person who shared it. So give us a good quote and you might get it back with some added perspective that may or may not include mice, hippos, or other deeply personal associations that make sense only to me.